Post-impressionism redux

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Musee d'Orsay

Main hall, Musee d’Orsay (Courtesy: Benh, via Wikipedia, under CC-BY-2.5)

It was almost 30 years ago to the day that I attended my first exhibition of post-impressionist art. That was in London: it was Post-Impressionism at the Royal Academy of Arts, 1979-80, and we went on March 9, 1980, the last day of my first European trip. Last night, March 4, 2010, we went to the Masterpieces from Paris exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia. It is an exhibition of post-impressionist art sourced solely from the wonderful Musée d’Orsay. The Royal Academy of Arts exhibition, by contrast, contained paintings sourced from collections besides their own.

Now, being a librarian-archivist, bibliophile and all-round hoarder, I still have my catalogue from the 1980 exhibition, and so I did a little comparison. I loved that first exhibition – partly because the post-impressionist era is a favourite of mine – but when I compare the offerings from the two exhibitions, well, there’s a big difference. The Musée d’Orsay’s collection is outstanding and to see such paintings as Van Gogh’s “Starry night” and “Bedroom at Arles”, and Monet’s “Waterlily pond, green harmony” in my home town on the other side of the world is something to be treasured.

However, the The Musée d’Orsay exhibition is not only great because of these top masterpieces; it is full of treasures, big and small. Some of the small treasures that caught my attention included works by Maurice Denis. Now, I checked him out, too, in the two catalogues and found an interesting example of art on the move. In the 1980 exhibition was Denis’ lovely, colourful “Sunlight on the Terrace” (1890). The catalogue, as catalogues do, said it was “Lent by a private collector, St Germain-en-Laye”. Clearly that collector did not hang on to this gorgeous piece (and wouldn’t it be interesting to know the story behind that) because here it now is in the Musée d’Orsay’s collection.  This current exhibition catalogue says it was “purchased, 1986”. I liked this little work, as well as a few others by Denis.

As, I think, most of us like to do when we go to an art exhibition, I looked for a work or two that particularly appealed to me. Of course, it’s hard to go past the “biggies” like the Van Goghs, Cezannes, Monets, and the like. We’d seen some before, but they were then, and will remain always, stupendous. However, the fun is finding new artists or new works to take your fancy. For me, this time, these new works included a couple by Denis. They also included an artist I don’t recollect having heard of before, Théo van Rysselberghe. He worked quite a bit, though not solely, in the pointilist style, and two of his works are in the exhibition. The one that particularly appealed to me was “The man at the tiller” (1892). While the waves seemed a little clumsy to me, I was drawn to its simple but dramatic composition. I also like its allusion to Hokusai’s famous “The great wave of Kanagawa” (1829-1832) – and I like it because I am fascinated by pointilist painting.

The exhibition – of 112 works by 35 artists – is beautifully curated. The works, which cover the significant styles and schools – including Pointilism, Neo-impressionism, Synthetism, Symbolism, the Pont-Aven School, and the Nabis – that loosely comprise the Post-Impressionists, are spread thematically across 6 rooms. This arrangement works well to demonstrate development within these styles as well as between them – and it resulted in several artists appearing in different rooms as they developed their style over the period. And, the lighting is magnificent. “Starry night”, for one, simply shimmers. It’s no wonder that the Gallery reached its target of 250,000 visits 6 weeks before closing. This is a blockbuster to end all blockbusters.

(Note: I have not included images of any of the artworks here due to copyright complications. While the works themselves are generally out of copyright there are arguments that images of these works are not. I am not willing to take on the “big boys” on this matter as the Wikimedia Foundation did last year. And anyhow, they are mostly easy to find with a quick Google search, if you are interested)

The Diagram Prize for the oddest title of the year

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I know you’ve been waiting for it: the longlist for the Bookseller/Diagram Prize is out – and in fact was out in early February. You can find it in the Guardian article here. As no doubt some of you know, this prize began in 1978 as a way, says the Wikipedia article to which I’ve linked, of providing entertainment during the 1978 Frankfurt Book Fair.

What a hoot! Not surprisingly, many of the winners have been non-fiction titles. Last year’s winner for example was The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais. There was a readership for that? One of those longlisted for this year is the rather clever The origin of faeces. I wouldn’t want to give you all a bum steer (sorry folks!), but my vote’s with this one!

Right now I can’t think of any particularly odd titles that I’ve come across in recent times – but here are a few title awards that I’d like to give:

Hardest to get right

Winner: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
How many people have you heard get that one wrong? People seem to have trouble getting all of “Potato Peel Pie” in when they tell you about it.

Runner up: Extremely loud and incredibly close
I have a friend who referred to it in an email like this: “Foer’s Amazingly and Suddenly (I’m sorry I can’t keep that title straight)”. She made my day, and every time I think of Foer, I think of her and smile!

Runner up (yes, I have a tie): True history of the Kelly Gang
People will start it with “The”!

Most appealing

Winner: An artist of the floating world
I know, this is a title in translation, but every time I hear it my spirit lifts and just, well, floats…

Runner up: It’s raining in Mango
Because we (here) need rain and I love mangoes. I rest my case.

Haruki Murakami, Hardboiled wonderland and the end of the world

Cover image, used by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.

Funniest

Winner: The man who mistook his wife for a hat
A rare non-fiction entry in my list – and a very serious topic – but a worthy winner nonetheless.

Runner up: Hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world
Not laugh out loud funny so much as bizarre. It also vies for “hardest to get right” honours too.

I could go on, making up more categories as I go but that would be too silly.

Titles are important –  though I wonder how significant they are to the success of a book, particularly for a lesser known author? Some years ago there was an article in the Sydney Morning Herald titled “What it takes to title a book”. In it Julian Barnes says:

“If I had a euro for every book title that copies the formula of Flaubert’s Parrot, I’d be a rich man,” he says, citing the examples of Pushkin’s Button and the recently published Audubon’s Elephant.

The article is fascinating, ranging over such issues as titles and commercial success, author versus publisher’s role in titling, working titles, duplicate titles, words like “midnight” that have their own “magic title buzz” – and so on.  According to the article – and many of you Fitzgerald fans will know this – F. Scott’s title for The great Gatsby was Under the red white and blue because it was about the American dream. His publisher had other ideas, and the rest as they say…  Similarly, Jane Austen afficionados are well aware that her first title for Pride and prejudice was First impressions.

What’s in a name? Plenty, it seems… Do you have any favourite titles? Or favourite title stories?

Jack London, War

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What do I know about Jack London? Not much really, except that he wrote adventure stories like Call of the wild and White fang, and, intriguingly, a study of London slums, People of the abyss. So, when this week’s Library of America story was “War” (1911) by Jack London, I decided to read it. You can read it too, here.

“War” is an adventure story, of sorts. It is also, obviously, a war story. The plot is a simple one: a young man of 24 or so is out on a scouting mission:

…his task was to find what he feared to find. He must go on, and on, until somewhere, some time, he encountered another man, or other men, from the other side, scouting, as he was scouting, to make a report, of having come in touch.

I like the way London universalises his story by using no names. There are only two characters that count: “the young man with the quick black eyes”, our protagonist, and “the man with the ginger beard” , whom he meets along the way. It’s a short, short story and is told in two parts. In the first we are introduced to the young man and learn that

He was no coward, but his courage was only that of the average civilised man, and he was looking to live, not die.

In this part he comes across “the man with the ginger beard”. In part two, still on his scouting mission, he comes across what appears to be “a deserted farmhouse” where, after being tempted (not biblically, but the allusion is biblical nonetheless) by apples, he has his second encounter with “the man with the ginger beard”. I am being purposefully vague here as I do not want to give away what is a quick and worthwhile read.

The story is sparely told. The language is simple and evocative, with minimal use of adjectives, giving a sense of a world pared to the elementals:

It was high noon of a breathless day of heat.

and

Twice he essayed to start, and twice he paused. He was appalled by his own loneliness.

and

Another day, hot and breathless.

and

Again outside, he led the horse around the barn and invaded [my emphasis] the orchard.

This is a story about the irony and inhumanity of war. It is not a new story really but, due primarily to the tight way in which London engages our imagination and builds to the climax, it is shocking nonetheless. Clearly there’s more to Jack London than I thought!

Sawako Ariyoshi, The doctor’s wife

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The doctor’s wife is the third Ariyoshi novel that I’ve read. The other two – The River Ki and The twilight years – I read well over a decade ago. According to Wikipedia The doctor’s wife is considered her best novel. All, though, are fascinating reads providing an insight into a culture which is so different from my own but in which, at the same time, people experience similar desires, pressures and emotions.

The twilight years is set in 1970s Japan and beautifully captures the cultural changes that were occurring around the time as Japan was (and still probably is) moving from  feudal/traditional parent child relationships to our more modern independent ways, with women caught in the middle. The River Ki chronicles three generations of women from the late 19th to mid 20th century, exploring changing attitudes and expectations of women. You are probably getting a picture here and you’d be right: Ariyoshi’s overriding theme concerns the role of women in Japanese society, both historically and in modern times. (Ariyoshi died in 1984.)

Hanaoka Seishu

Hanaoka Seishu (Public domain, via Wikipedia)

The doctor’s wife is an historical novel, spanning 70 years from around 1760 to 1830 and based on the life of famous Japanese doctor Hanaoka Seishu. A quick plot summary. The doctor’s wife is Kae, a young woman from a wealthy family, who is lured to become Seishu’s bride by his ambitious mother Otsugi, herself a woman married from a wealthy into a poorer family. The novel then chronicles Kae’s life in this extended family household as Seishu develops his medical skill and training until, near the end, he performs the world’s first surgery under anaesthetic (1804, breast cancer)*. While Seishu’s development as a doctor frames the novel, the real plot concerns the relationship between Kae and Otsugi.

The novel is told in third person, mostly the more objective omniscient voice, but occasionally we feel we are specifically in the heads of Kae or Otsugi. According to my edition’s introduction, Ariyoshi had access to Seishu’s personal records, diaries and books. However, being a man of his time and a doctor focused on his research, he did not, I assume, document much of his family life. The story, then, of the women is largely fictional. Mostly through dialogue, with description as needed, Ariyoshi describes how the loving supportive role Otsugi initially presented towards her daughter-in-law changes when her son (who had been married to Kae in absentia some three years before) returns home from his medical studies in Kyoto. Overnight, the relationship, to Kae’s shock and distress, changes into a competitive one – a competition that has serious consequences as they vie to be guinea pigs for his experiments in anaesthesia. Both women are presented as flawed, but as it is Kae who opens the novel and is the more powerless, it is with her that we are most keen to identify and empathise.

Why has Ariyoshi chosen to tell this story of conflict and competition within an historically based story of a great man? Does the historical “truth” add credibility to her exploration of familial power discrepancies? I’m not sure it’s necessary, but perhaps it helps … It is a very human tale – the grand gestures made by the women to support his research are small in the scheme of things though the impact on them, particularly on Kae, is immense. Ariyoshi realistically explores the nuances of their relationship through the normal day-to-day patterns of life (weaving, cooking, house management, childbirth) suggesting that this sort of conflict doesn’t have to be but that it often (traditionally, even) is. In fact, we readers are lulled into seeing it as the norm – the lot of women – until we are shocked out of that frame of mind near the end by Seishu’s unmarried sister who says (in broken speech because she is ill):

I think this sort of tension among females . . . is . . . to the advantage . . . of . . . every male.

She continues to explain her particular perspective on women’s secondary lot, and pronounces that:

as long as there are men and women side by side on this earth, I wouldn’t want to be reborn a woman into such a world.

Clearly, given the story Ariyoshi has told, she rather agrees  – or, at least, agrees for such societies as she depicts here in which women’s lot is not only an inferior one but which work to discourage them from cooperating and supporting each other. The novel may be set in Japan, but the fundamental truths, unfortunately, are not so confined.

What I have described here is the main story, but there’s more here that can be discussed, including the development (or history) of medicine in the east and west, the experimentation on animals and humans, and Japanese social life and customs in the Tokugawa period.

It’s a short but engrossing read. It falters a little I think right at the end when the historical facts are presented so prosaically that they threaten to overwhelm its novelistic achievements, but the last line fuses the two so beautifully that you forgive this.  The doctor’s wife is a fascinating and keenly observed novel that deserves to be read.

*Ironically, in 1811, novelist Fanny Burney underwent a horrific mastectomy without anaesthesia because it was unknown in the west!

Sawako Ariyoshi
The doctor’s wife
(trans. by Wakako Hironaka and Ann Silla Kostant)
Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1966 (orig ed), 1978 (trans)
174pp.
ISBN: 0870114654

Kevin Barry, Fjord of Killary

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Sick and Indigent Roomkeepers' Society, London

A propos of nothing really, except it's Irish and makes me laugh ruefully like Barry's story

I hadn’t heard of Kevin Barry when his short story published in The New Yorker this month, “Fjord of Killary“, was brought to my attention. Kevin Barry is an Irish writer, born in Limerick in 1969, and this makes him 40 (or 41 this year). The first person narrator of the story is the same age, which rather suggests an autobiographical element, but … that’s for Barry to say! On turning 40, he (the narrator that is, a poet and a self-confessed “hopeless romantic”) did the sea-change thing, that is, he bought a pub on the west coast of Ireland and left his city life behind:

I had made – despite it all – a mild success of myself in life. But on turning forty, the previous year, I had sensed exhaustion rising up in me, like rot. Before forty, you think that exhaustion is something like a long-lasting hang-over. But at forty you learn all about it. Even your passions exhaust you. I found that to be alone with the work all day was increasingly difficult. And the city had become a jag on my nerves – there was too much young flesh around.

This is, it turns out, a mid-life crisis story. It takes place one night, in his pub. There is a storm raging outside and the waters from the fjord threatened to flood the pub … as indeed they do to the point that our narrator, with his customers and staff, retreat to the upper floor. Despite the reference to the cannibalistic black-backed gull eating its mate, this is not a gothic tale (of “the night was dark and stormy” ilk), or one of those tragic Irish sea stories. Rather it is a somewhat comic, somewhat satirical tale, about a publican whose sea-change doesn’t quite seem to be working.

The satire is conveyed in language which is both mock-heroic and melodramatic: the skies are “disgracefully gray “, the locals are prone to “magnificent mood swings”, and the downpour is “hysterical”. Our narrator self-deprecatingly equates himself with the many poets who have tried to escape to the countryside, the, as he describes it, “hypochondriacal epiphany-seeker”. He even manages a sly dig at the English occupation – yet another disaster the pub has had to withstand! There is straight-tending-to-the-absurd humour too. If you have ever spent a few hours in an Irish pub on a rainy, rainy day, as Mr Gums and I did in Avoca three decades ago (can it really be so?), Barry’s description of the drinkers and their ability to keep talking regardless of what’s going on around them or who is listening will ring true! As our narrator says of his customers:

They were all nut jobs. This is what it comes down to. This is the thing you learn about habitual country drinkers. They suffer all manner of delusions, paranoia and warped fantasies…

And he doesn’t? The joke in many ways is on him, because while these people are getting on with their odd, messy, unique lives, he is floundering.

This is a wonderfully Irish story in its wry and sly but also rather absurd take on life.  As for the ending? Well, I won’t give that away, except to say that, with my little blue pen, I wrote against the last line, “Love it!”. Read it here, and see what you think.

Sarah Waters in conversation with Marion Halligan

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Sarah Waters
Sarah Waters, 2006 (Courtesy: Annie_C_2, via Wikipedia, under Creative Commons CC-BY-2.0)

In a delightful coincidence, Sarah Waters was in town tonight for a literary event, just one night after my reading group discussed her novel The little stranger – and so, naturally, those of us who were free turned up to hear her converse with Canberra novelist and literati, Marion Halligan.

It can be very special hearing one novelist interview another – and this was one of those occasions. Marion and Sarah appeared very comfortable together, respectful of each other’s skills, and Sarah was generous and open in her answers – except when it came to the ending of The little stranger! All she said on THAT score was that she left it deliberately open but that she tried to lead the reader to a certain conclusion. She’s been fascinated, she said, by the discussions that have ensued about the ending. Don’t we know it!

That said, she did share some things about The little stranger, and these may or may not throw light on the mystery! Its subject is of course class, and the changes that were occurring in post-war England. She said that her original plan was to use Dr Faraday as a straightforward, transparent narrator, someone who was firmly in the middle class and a friend of the family, and who would chronicle their decline. But as she started writing, she decided to make him more uncomfortable class-wise with some lingering class resentments. A little later, she talked about poltergeists and how they represent the release of unresolved tensions, conflicts and frustrations. Hmmm … if we accept poltergeists, then I think we have to see that more than one “person” is implicated in what happened at Hundreds Hall.

Some interesting issues were raised during question time. I’ll just dot-point the ones that grabbed me in particular:

  • Echoes of and homages to other works. Waters said that she does a lot of research for her novels and that that research includes reading fiction of the era she’s researching. It’s not surprising then, she said, if people see echoes of works like Brideshead revisited, The yellow wallpaper, Rebecca and The fall of the House of Usher in this novel. She doesn’t mind people seeing these in her work.
  • Genre. She was asked how the demands of genre shape her work, and her response was that she likes to see how you can both bend genre and surrender to it at the same time.  You can certainly see her doing that in The little stranger in the way it takes the conventions of the ghost story and yet does not resolve it in any way that you could call traditional.
  • Setting a novel overseas. For some reason, someone asked whether she would ever consider setting a novel outside of England. Her flippant response was that she thought she did well to move The little stranger from her usual London to Warwickshire!  But, then she answered seriously, and I found her response interesting. She didn’t give us that old chestnut about “writing what you know”. Rather, she said she likes “to have dialogues with the traditions of British fiction”. Good for her; she has a PhD in English literature and is clearly imbued with its traditions. The Roger Federer of the literary world perhaps?

Interspersed throughout the hour were some light-hearted interactions between Sarah and Marion. One concerned the fact that Sarah writes historical novels while Marion focuses on contemporary subjects. Marion said she admired all the research Sarah does, and suggested that lazy people write in the present. Sarah quickly rejoined that writing in the present is terrifying. Where, she said, is the security of the research. Vive la différence, I say!

There was more, as you can imagine, but that is the gist of it…except of course to boast that I do now have my very own signed copy of The little stranger.

ANU/The Canberra Times Meet the Author

Sarah Waters, The little stranger

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The little stranger, by Sarah Waters

The little stranger (Book cover courtesy: Virago Press)

I’m not quite sure I know where to start with this one –  the ghost story that isn’t. Or is it? The little stranger is my second Sarah Waters’ novel. I found The night watch riveting, and I did see and enjoy (but not read) her very Dickensian Fingersmith.

Like The night watch, The little stranger was shortlisted for The Man Booker Prize. It’s an easy read, and rather a page-turner, but by the end I have to say that I felt a little unsure about what I’d read. In one of those interesting bits of reading synchronicity, I recently read Helen Simonson’s Major Pettigrew’s last stand. It is very different to this one, and is set a few decades later, but they both deal with the loss of “old families” and the breaking up of their estates. Waters, though, is the far superior writer.

So, what is the plot of The little stranger? Its first person narrator, Dr Faraday, was born to the working class but, through family sacrifice, has pulled himself up into the professional middle class. After a brief flashback to a childhood memory of Hundreds Hall, where his mother had worked as a housemaid, he proceeds to chronicle the relationship he develops with the Hall’s family when he is in his late 30s and practising in the nearby town as a GP. The family comprises the mother, Mrs Ayres, and her adult children, Caroline and Roderick. The book is set soon after World War 2, and the story he tells occurs over the period of about a year, but is told from the vantage point of some three years later.

Waters is best in her vivid description of the house, its inhabitants and its increasing dilapidation. I’m tempted to read the house as a metaphor for the society it represents – for the days of elegance and upstairs-downstairs that are now on the way out.  And, extending this idea, “the little stranger” (or “dark germ”) that seems hell-bent on bringing about the house’s destruction could then be seen as a metaphor for the rapid modernisation that was occurring in post-war England and that was pushing the old families to the brink of economic and, thereby, social ruin. After all, servant Mrs Bazeley reassures the young servant girl Betty that “it” is not interested in them.

To support this way of looking at the novel, here is Dr Faraday early-ish in the novel:

But Hundreds Hall had been made and maintained, I thought, by the very people they were laughing at now. After two hundred years, those people had begun to withdraw their labour, their belief in the house; and the house was collapsing, like a pyramid of cards. Meanwhile, here the family sat, still playing gaily at gentry life, with chipped stucco on their walls, and their Turkish carpets worn to the weave…

And here is Dr Seeley (to whom he later goes for advice):

The Ayreses’ problem … is that they can’t or won’t adapt … Class-wise they’ve had their chips. Nerve-wise, perhaps they’ve run their course.

Quotes like these support a social change interpretation. And yet, perhaps it is more psychological? Dr Seeley suggests that part of one’s psychology, one’s dream-self , can break loose and become some sort of “psychic force”:

The subliminal mind has many dark, unhappy corners, after all. Imagine something loosening itself from one of those corners. Let’s call it a – a germ. And let’s say conditions prove right for that germ to develop – to grow … What would this little stranger grow into? A sort of shadow-self, perhaps a Caliban, a Mr Hyde. A creature motivated by all the nasty impulses and hungers the conscious mind had hoped to keep hidden away: things like envy, and malice and frustration…

Somewhat supporting this interpretation is Caroline’s report of her mother as saying:

the house knows all our weaknesses, and is testing them one by one.

And so what do you think? Psychological/psychic or social? Or perhaps bit of both? That is, the arrogant upper class family out of touch and unable to adapt (social) releasing all its weaknesses (psychic). I’m not sure that Waters makes the case clearly enough – partly I think due to the ambiguity posed by the narrator.

Her characterisation is in fact coherent and convincing, except for the narrator. How are we to read him? Is he genuine – does he really care for the family? Does he genuinely care for the house and its history? Or, is he a social climber who wants his way into the house any way he can. I must say I couldn’t fully work him out. Is he reliable? The tone is quite reminiscent of that in Ishiguro’s wonderful Remains of the day. Like Ishiguro’s butler, Dr Faraday tells the story from some time after the events, and he peppers his account with such words as “recall”, “I think I noticed”, “must have”, words that suggest that all may not be as he sees it. And in some ways it isn’t, but there is no intriguing twist, neither is there a traditional resolution. As I read I wondered whether he was stringing me along, whether he was the cause of the malevolence. He did after all chip away a decorative acorn from the house on his youthful visit:

I was  like a man, I suppose, wanting a lock of hair from the head of a girl he had suddenly and blindingly become enamoured of.

If he was the malevolence, there is no evidence to suggest it is anything other than unconscious. And further, if he was, it certainly makes the whole class divide story more complex – and, more interesting.

Regardless, though, of how the end comes about, of “who” (one? many? none?) is responsible, it is pretty clear that the winners – if there can be such things in the messy game of life – are the old underclass. Hundreds was, in Dr Seeley’s view, “defeated by history, destroyed by its own failure to keep pace with a rapidly changing world”. It is not surprising, I suppose, that by the end the narrator is both “baffled and longing”.  Social change never has been easy!

Sarah Waters
The little stranger
London: Virago, 2009
450pp.
ISBN: 9781844086023

Kill your darlings, and literary reviewing

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Kill your darlings is a new Australian “independent publication of fresh, clever writing that combines intellect with intrigue” (from their website). The first issue, March 2010 Issue no. 1, contains an article by Gideon Haigh on what he believes to be the parlous state of literary reviewing in Australia. The article is titled “Feeding the Hand that Bites: The Demise of Australian Literary Reviewing”. Haigh and Andrew Wilkins (of Wilkins Farago Publishing) were interviewed this week by Ramona Koval on her Radio National program The Book Show. You can listen to it by clicking here.

The interview focused on professional reviewing, and only briefly touched on the blog community and other reviewing activity on the Internet (such as what they called “fan writing” on sites like Amazon). Haigh believes that good reviewing is an important part of, what I would call, our literary health, arguing that good reviews can instruct and help writers improve their writing.

I’m not going to comment in detail on the interview (after all you can listen to it yourself) but here are some of the points made:

  • Good reviews are a dialogue between reader and reviewer. This is certainly true in the blog community, as we all know, but I take the point too regarding those reviews which engage us in an internal dialogue in which we test and mull over the ideas presented
  • Newspapers are moving more and more to short capsule reviews of around 400 words. How can you “summarise” a book in 400 words they said? What do we bloggers think is a good length for a review? Is there one? Or does it depend – and if so on what?
  • Fewer reviews are being written in Australia – newspapers are buying reviews from each other and from overseas sources. I’m certainly aware of a plethora of articles/reviews from The Guardian, UK in Australian newspapers.

There was a lot more, including discussion about the changing economics of newspaper and book publishing and the effect on reviewing … but hopefully this will whet your appetite to listen to the program yourselves, because right now I need to get back to reading so I can write my next review!

Oh, and if you are interested in this subject, from a slightly but not totally different angle, you might also like to check out Tom’s recent post on blogging and reviews over at his A Common Reader blog.

Jorge Amado, Gabriela, clove and cinnamon

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Jorge Amado

Jorge Amado, 1985 (Courtesy: Xan Carballa, via flickr, using CC-BY-NC-2.0)

How could you resist reading a book with a title like this? I don’t manage to read all the books scheduled for the various bookgroups I belong to, but when this one came up I decided it was a must – because it was by a non-Anglo writer and one I hadn’t read before, and because of its gorgeously evocative title. I wasn’t disappointed. This is fun and rather easy to read, but that doesn’t mean it’s simple.

Jorge Amado is a Brazilian writer, and Gabriela, clove and cinnamon (1958) is set in Ilhéus, a coastal city where he spent his childhood. The novel takes place in 1925 – during a time of great social change:

New streets had been opened, automobiles brought in, mansions built, roads constructed, newspapers published, clubs organised – Ilhéus was transformed. But the ways men think and feel evolve more slowly. Thus it has always been in every society. (p. 2)

The basic plot concerns Nacib (the Arab) and his love for Gabriela (the simple, but sensuous, mulatto girl he hires as his cook). But the book’s subject matter is far wider, dealing with politics and society at a time when “old ways” were being challenged by “new ways”. The “old ways” are typified by macho violence, by the notion, really, that “might is right”. Violence is used by the old leaders (mostly the “colonels”) to attain and maintain political power – and to maintain possession of women. It was accepted practice, for example, for a man to kill an adulterous wife and her lover. In fact, the novel starts with such a murder and then a little later we hear of another man being reviled for not doing so, even though his way of handling it had a delicious come-uppance about it. Ilhéus is, we are told, changing but not yet civilised; it still clings to its old and violent customs; it is

so feudal still despite its much publicised and undeniable progress.

While men hold the power, the novel is structured around women. There are four chapters, each commencing with a poem about a woman:

  • The languor of Ofenísia (who would rather die a virgin if she can’t have the Emperor)
  • The loneliness of Gloria (the mistress of a wealthy man, who has everything but what she wants)
  • The secret of Malvina (the young student who will not be controlled by a man)
  • The moonlight of Gabriela (the free spirit who should not be changed)

The first, Ofenísia, does not really appear as an active character in the book (though we are told that her “importance must not be judged by the brevity of her appearance”). The other three though manage to achieve what they want…and in doing so they epitomise the conflict between the “old ways” and the “new”, between maintaining the “status quo” (with its attendant double standard) and accepting change.

The book is peopled with a wonderful array of characters. I found it hard at the start to keep track of all the characters – particularly the many Colonels – but eventually I did, and realised that they fall into two main camps: those tied to the “old ways” and those supporting change. Colonel Ramiro Bastos is the leader of the former, and new arrival Mundinho Falcâo is a proponent of new ways of doing things, such as through negotiation. This conflict is represented literally and symbolically by the sandbar. It prevents the town being used as a port for the new cacao industry and Falcâo promises to dredge it. The scene is set for a big showdown as the various citizens of the town align themselves with one side or another, but the resolution is not as simple and dramatic as we expect. And this is partly what makes this a novel well worth reading. Change is presented as generally good, but it is not “simply” or even always so. Amado conveys this subtly. The characters are complex and through their very realistic interactions and sometimes contradictory behaviours we see that old versus new is not a simple dichotomy. Gabriela, for example, cannot be changed to fit Nacib’s image of a wealthy man’s wife: she is a free spirit who doesn’t quite represent the old or the new. She just is. And symbolically, the sandbar will not stay dredged and will need regular clearing. It is not a simple answer to continued progress for Ilhéus. Nonethess, by the end, some level of civilisation is achieved. At the trial of the husband who’d murdered his adulterous wife and her lover at the beginning of the book, the lawyer Dr Ezequiel Prado is reported as saying:

Ilhéus was no longer a land of bandits, a paradise of assassins; his theme was civilization and progress.

It is interesting to think that this book was published around the same time as Patrick White’s Tree of man (1955) and Voss (1957). Amado and White are both described as modernists, but how different they are. White is psychologically intense, while Amado here is full of humour, colour and movement, reflecting the messiness of society. Modernism, though, is a forgiving church as Lisa (ANZLitLovers) shows in her post on the subject.

There is so much to write about this book. Its humour and satire, the complex characterisation, the clever way the double murder introduced at the beginning is woven as a motif through the book, and the breadth of its subject-matter are just a few of the the topics that could be explored in depth.

I’ll leave those for others though and come back to a favourite aspect for me which is its thorough analysis of the way the desire for progress clashes with the status quo. I’ll end with statements made by two of the town’s old guard. First, the Colonel who sees that change is coming:

That’s right Colonel. Everything you’ve said is right as far as it goes. But it’s right by the conditions and needs of an earlier time. We spend our lives working hard, and we don’t realise that time is going by and that things are changing…

Then, the Colonel who doesn’t see it:

What does Ilhéus want beyond what we’re giving it? What more is there to do? To tell the truth I don’t see these new needs.

It was ever thus eh?

Jorge Amado
Gabriela, clove and cinnamon
(trans. by James L. Taylor and William L. Grossman)
New York: Vintage International, 1958 (1992)
426pp.
ISBN: 9780307276650

Musica Viva, the Internet and Borodin

/ Whispering Gums / 11 Comments

Tonight was the opening of our Musica Viva 2010 International Concert Season. The performers were the Borodin Quartet, and they performed two quartets by Shostakovich and one by their namesake, Borodin. I’m not going to review this concert in detail because, as I’ve said before, I have no musical training and so can’t comment in any detail on the structure of the music or the technical skill of the musicians. There are things though that I can talk about.

The first thing is the Internet. Like many of us, I like to keep an eye on how organisations and businesses use the Internet to enhance their services. A few years ago Musica Viva started making their concert programs available online before the concert. Not only did this mean you didn’t have to pay for a printed program at the venue but you could read up on the pieces beforehand. In addition to this aid to audience education, they have, for some years, offered free pre-concert talks. We never managed to get to those which is a shame as I’m sure they would have further enhanced our appreciation of the concerts but, well, you just can’t fit in everything. This year, though, they have replaced this with a new feature: online concert talks – which they say they will make available around 2 weeks before the concert. You can check out the talks offered for tonight’s Borodin concert here. What a great way to use the Internet to help audience members get the most out of the concerts. As the athletes at the Winter Olympics say, I’m stoked!

The next thing is a little more esoteric. I may not be trained in music, but I am a trained librarian/archivist. I was therefore rather chuffed to read that Borodin, an industrial chemist as well as composer, invented “a chemical compound – a special type of gelatine coating – that enabled him to preserve his [hand-written] musical work for posterity” (from the concert program). How great is that?

Cello

Cello (Courtesy: Clker, by OCAL)

And now for the concert. Three pieces were played:

  • Dmitri Shostakovich String Quartet no. 4 in D major, op. 83 (1949)
  • Dmitri Shostakovich String Quartet no. 13 in B flat minor, op. 138 (1960-70)
  • Alexander Borodin String Quartet no. 2 in D major (1881)

It was a lovely concert. The two Shostakovich pieces were a little more demanding for those in the audience who like something more traditional, but I thought both were beautiful. The end of his 4th quartet, with a slowly sustained fading line from the cello supported by light (not bright) pizzicato from the other instruments, was played sensitively and left us with a wistful melancholy. According to the program, Shostakovich said that music should always have “two layers” and that Jewish folk music with its ability to “be happy while it is tragic” is close to his vision of music. Both these quartets reflected, I think, this goal though in the mostly sombre 13th it was much harder to find! My concert neighbour (not Mr Gums, but on my other side) and I agreed that this was not music to listen to at home on the radio or a CD, but to hear live, in the concert hall.

The Borodin is a different kettle of fish – romantic, with all the richness and lyricism you associate with that period. The third movement, the Notturno (or Nocturne), is famous. I recognised it immediately but if you had asked me before the concert who wrote it I would have “guessed” Beethoven. Well, it is Romantic! But, hearing it tonight, I realised that it does sound a little more “modern” than Beethoven, and that’s about as technical as I’ll get!

All in all, a lovely concert – interesting music well played – to start this year’s season. Next up The Harp Consort. You never know, I may be inspired to tell you about that one too.